This is a video I made a couple of years ago while doing research into the topics Edward Royle covered in his important book on 19th-century freethinkers. I’m still very interested in this very early period of transatlantic freethought-radicalism and especially between the international “family of Philosophes” and the secular radicals. Here also are the notes I wrote during this research:
1769-1848, son of the "inventor" of the first commercial steam engine in Britain. Grew up in Birmingham and was educated on the continent. Was a friend and acquaintance of the Lunar society members and their children. According to Eric Robinson:
"Oppression, for these young men, attaining their majorities just as the [French] Revolution began, was a series of incidents which they had observed with their own eyes-not a distant and distanced scene. In their criticism of the French aristocracy and royalty they had been nodded encouragement by their fathers and their fathers' friends who greeted the Revolution with rapture, and held banquets to commemorate the fall of the Bastille. As the young men came mainly from Dissenting homes so they resented religious domination, as they were middle class they abhorred the idleness of the aristocracy." ("An English Jacobin", 350)
Watt Jr. went to France as a sales representative of the Walkers in Spring, 1792 and along with Thomas Cooper made a presentation and conveyed the greetings of the Constitutional Society of Manchester to the Jacobin Club.
"Within a week Burke attacked them fiercely in the Commons, his rhetoric being employed to great effect but with no true moderation. 'There were in this country', he said, 'men who scrupled not to enter into an alliance with a set in France of the worst traitors and regicides that had ever been heard of-the club of Jacobins'. He attacked by name Thomas Cooper, James Watt and Thomas Walker. Immediately James Watt senior wrote to ask his son to be more moderate lest the antipathy he aroused might allow Boulton and Watt's enemies, the Hornblowers, to get a bill through Parliament weakening Watt's patent for the steam engine." (351)
As the Revolution devolved into the Terror,
English 'philosophes' began to see that the Revolution had succumbed to mob violence, though it is doubtful whether they suspected that the mob was being steered. Young Watt still makes a defence for the revolutionaries, but it is clear that his stomach is beginning to turn: 'I am filled with involuntary horror at the scenes which pass before me and wish they could have been avoided, but at the same time I allow the absolute necessity of them. In some instances the vengeance of the people has been savage & inhuman. They have dragged the dead naked body of the Princess de Lamballe through the streets & treated it with all sorts of indignities. Her head stuck upon a Pike was carried through Paris and shown to the King & Queen, who are in hourly expectation of the same fate'.
The murdered princess, Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy (1749-92), was the wife of the richest man in France and apparently Marie Antionette's best friend, 353). Robinson continues that "in England the fear of revolution was producing a thick suspicion of :
all those who were known to have contacts with France, or to have been associated in any way with political reform. Letters containing sentiments like that expressed above by James Watt junior were known to the ministry who tapped the post, and they obviously helped to justify official fears. Boulton and Watt sent their letters to France by devious channels in order to avoid interference, but even so they were extremely cautious how they worded their letters. Many dissenting 'philosophes' felt themselves to be in the grip of a tyranny from which America provided the only escape. In all their correspondence there is a dominant theme-emigration. The names of the land lots on the Priestley lands on the Susquehanna give an idea of the varied localities from which the English émigrés came--Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich, etc." (353).
In 1999, Peter M. Jones took another look at James Watt Jr., after nearly a half century, after the final collection of Watt papers was transferred to the public archive in 1994. Jones describes the "discrete 'family' of philosophes in the West Midlands who maintained close links with their counterparts on the continent" and examines how the French Revolution and the English reaction to it "have murdered Philosophy & continue to torment all of Europe", in the words of Watt Sr. ("Living the Enlightenment and the French Revolution", 157). Both Watt Sr. and his business partner, [[Matthew Boulton]], "came to see themselves as philosophes, that is to say as members of a pan-European -- indeed pan-Western -- 'family' of discoverers and disseminators of useful knowledge. However," Jones continues, "both found themselves caught up in the contradictions and dilemmas of the late Enlightenment. Is knowledge value-free? How should it be transmitted? Ought it be made available to all, irrespective of social station?" (158). These are interesting questions, but suggest some more that seem to have been beyond the scope of their concerns: to what extent are "discoveries" and "inventions" private property that should be protected by patents? And what happens to the "family" of scholars when their nations go to war with each other?
The philosophes of the [[Lunar Society]] established by Boulton in 1765 included [[Erasmus Darwin]], [[James Keir]], [[Samuel Galton Jr.]], [[Josiah Wedgwood]], [[Joseph Priestley]], [[James Watt]], [[Thomas Day]], [[William Small]], and [[William Withering]]. [[Benjamin Franklin]] was introduced to the society in 1758 and maintained a close correspondence.
James Watt Jr. later lamented in a letter to his father, "my friends in France, the friends of rational liberty have most of them passed the fatal guillotine and the reigning party were always objects of my hatred as well as Mr Cooper's" (179). This and his son's reduced activism seems to have mollified Watt Sr. In any case, the links between natural science and natural philosophy were breaking. "The cultural climate that had allowed informal and socially dilute bodies like the Lunar Society to flourish had disintegrated and would not be reconstituted for a generation and more. The emigration to America of Dr. Priestley, together with many hundreds of less-well-known 'friends of liberty' acknowledged as much. A period of twenty-two years of nearly continuous continental and maritime warfare after 1792 would also gravely weaken the free trade in knowledge which the philosophes had taken for granted" (180). The revolutionary period had commenced with excitement: "on a fine summer's evening towards the end of July 1789, Harry Priestley burst into his parents' house at Barr shouting 'Hurrah! Liberty, Reason, brotherly love for ever! ... France is free, the Bastille is taken.' Two years later that young man's father, Dr. Joseph Priestley, was still insisting that the combined effects of the American and the French Revolutions had shifted the world 'from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom" (181). When the founding generation of the Lunar Society retired, moved away, and died in the last decade of the 18th century, their sons seem to have retreated from both politics and from their excitement over discussing science together (although several, like Gregory Watt, continued working in science). It's almost as if the loss of a "family of philosophes" took all the fun out of discovery.
James Watt Jr., Temporary Jacobin